March 21, 2006

What really happened in the Balkans

A reader writes:


I got really, really interested in the whole Balkan situation at the time it was happening. Read all kinds of stuff, not just current events stuff but Serbian poetry and folklore, that sort of thing. I was still a center-leftie at the time, so I attended all sorts of center-lefty kinds of events about the war, and I got to be known as the guy who confused everybody with too many facts.

Some comments:

In terms of proximate causes, the conflict was basically Germany's fault. Germany, feeling its oats after reunification, immediately recognized both Slovenia and Croatia (historically parts of the Hapsburg Empire and hence in the German cultural sphere) when they broke away from Yugoslavia. Britain and the US were, at the time, trying to figure out how to keep Yugoslavia together, because Major and Bush foresaw that the breakup would be bloody. (BTW, little known fact: President Bush - 41 - made a commitment at the time of the breakup of Yugoslavia that the U.S. would not permit Serbian aggression in Kosovo. This was timely because Milosevic began his populist/nationalist campaign in 1989 by agitating to restore Serb dominance in Kossovo. The subject was of concern to the Turks in particular, which is why Bush made the commitment. People who cannot figure out why we went to war over Kossovo are probably forgetting that we drew a line in that particular patch of sand nearly a decade prior to the war.)

You'll recall that Secretary of State James Baker also tried to convince the Ukrainians not to split, for much the same reason (and I predict he'll be proved right - we continue to inch towards the likely eventual Ukrainian civil war, though thankfully we're still only inching). But, for the sake of European unity, France promptly followed Germany's lead and recognized Slovenia and Croatia, and then Britain followed suit. The U.S. held out for a while, but once all of Europe recognized the breakup of Yugoslavia there was no way to put the cat back in the bag.


The unity of Yugoslavia was a crucial priority for NATO throughout the Cold War, since ethnic divisiveness could be used as an excuse for a Soviet military intervention to re-incorporate neutral Yugoslavia within the Warsaw Pact. The news that Tito was dying of cancer that arrived in January 1980, immediately following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the hostage seizure in Tehran, was perhaps the most alarming moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was in college in January 1980 and the odds that we'd be drafted and have to fight in Europe in WWIII seemed pretty high at the time.

Fortunately, Yugoslavia held together for another decade. Then, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 broke up the Warsaw Pact and presumably gave an impetus by example to the break-up of Yugoslavia. That raised the question of whether a general trend toward breaking up along ethnic lines was in the West's interest or not. Should the breaking up of Yugoslavia be encouraged in order to make the reincorporation of the Warsaw Pact unthinkable and make the break-up of the Soviet Union thinkable? Our great fear for 40 years had been of a tank invasion from the East and the more the borders of Russian control were pushed back, the less likely it became. Or were we better off with the devil we knew?

(In general, it's easy to forget just how uncertain and perilous the future looked in 1989-1991. For example, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was deeply unhappy about German re-unification. I was sitting with General William Odom, the former head of the National Security Administration, at a dinner in 1999 where Mrs. Thatcher gave her a speech. During the Q&A, the very pro-German Gen. Odom gave her hell about this. Afterwards, Mrs. Thatcher came over to our table and argued heatedly with Gen. Odom for ten minutes. It ended with Gen. Odom telling her, "My ancestors hid behind trees and shot your ancestors wearing those stupid redcoats during the Revolutionary War!" Mrs. Thatcher laughed, and they went off to the bar and shot the breeze amiably for two hours. As we know now, German reunification turned out to be a net drag on the strength of Germany, so Mrs. T's traditional English fear of the might of a united Germany turned out to be misplaced. But, the future wasn't so obvious back then.)


Milosevic tried to invade both Slovenia and Croatia to keep Yugoslavia together. But there was no way he could hold on to either. Slovenia was, luckily for it, already a pretty monocultural entity, over 90% Slovene with no geographically concentrated minorities, so the Slovenian war of independence ended quickly and without too much bloodshed. But Croatia's territory included the Krajina region, which was overwhelmingly Serb and, moreover, the historic home of some of the most rabidly nationalist Serbs (naturally enough, since they were surrounded by Croats and were the top targets for expulsion or murder by the Croats during WWII). So the Krajina broke away from Croatia, and the Yugoslav army invaded to defend them against the Croats.

Bosnia was left surrounded and in an impossible situation. It had to declare independence to avoid being crushed by Serbia, but there was no chance it could hold together as a unitary state. And if it did break up, the largest component of the population - the Muslim Slavs - would have no ethnic state to call their own; they would either be a minority in a Greater Croatia or a minority in a Greater Serbia. It didn't help matters that the Serb region of Bosnia abutted not Serbia but the Krajina region of Croatia, and was separated from Serbia proper by Muslim and Croat regions. The situation is similar to the Armenian situation in Nagorno-Karabakh or the Palestinian Arabs split between Gaza and Judea/Samaria, or the old problem of East Prussia (and the new problem of the Russian enclave at Kaliningrad). So we got the very bloody and nasty Bosnian civil war.

The Croatian war ended when the West backed the Croats sufficiently that they were able to physically expel the Serb population from the Krajina. No people, no problem. If it weren't for the Bosnian Muslims, everyone could have gotten an ethno-national state by some combination of exchanging populations or exchanging territories. Serbia could have gotten the predominantly Serb regions of Bosnia, and Croatia could have gotten the rest, and Kosovo could have been partitioned between Serbia and Albania, leaving Serbia with the historic churches in the north of the region and Albania with the bulk of the Albanian population. But everybody treated Tito's borders as sacrosanct, and nobody was able to convince the Bosnian Muslims (did they try?) that they were better off as a minority in Greater Croatia then as the plurality in a totally nonfunctional multi-ethnic Bosnia.

Why were Tito's internal borders - which did not match the historical borders of the components of Yugoslavia - treated as sacrosanct? Well, once you start accepting the principle of re-drawing borders, where does it stop? Nobody was really worried about what was happening in the Balkans. People were worried about how the precedents set there could spill over into other parts of the world. What if Hungary decided to pursue a "Greater Hungary" strategy? There are big Hungarian minorities in Romania, Slovakia and Serbia. If we re-drew the map of the Balkans to suit the distribution of ethnic groups, wouldn't that encourage Hungary to pursue such a strategy?

But the real fear was Russia. There were very big Russian minorities in all of the Baltic states, in the Ukraine, in Moldova and in Kazakhstan. Once the Soviet Union broke up, everyone was rightly concerned that Russia would make territorial claims in one or more of these states - particularly once some of these states started actively disenfranchising the ethnic Russian population. To a considerable extent, the world's treatment of the situation in Yugoslavia was driven entirely by considerations about the precedents being set for the situation in Russia. The impact on the actual Yugoslavs was a secondary, if not a tertiary consideration.

At the time, I thought that Bob Dole had the right idea about what our policy should be: lift the arms embargo so the Bosnians had a chance to defend themselves, but don't get directly involved. In retrospect, this probably would have meant Hezbollah and al Qaeda providing most of the arms to the poor Bosniacs (which to some extent happened anyhow), and we'd have even bigger problems today. The only really good solution to Yugoslavia was partition into Slovenia, Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia, but this would have left smaller ethnicities like the Macedonians and the Bosnian Muslims high and dry, and besides nobody was in a position to impose such a settlement. And I guess I agree that the precedent such a settlement would have set would have been very bad in terms of its potential impact on Russia and, possibly, Hungary. So the Balkans were just screwed, kind of like they always are.

Even now, after the Iraq War that announced our willingness to use force to reorder the Middle East as we saw fit, we're - properly - constrained by our respect for borders. Iraq isn't a country; it would be far more logical to break it up than to try to keep it together. But we can't let, for example, the Kurds have their own state for fear that the precedent of carving a Kurdish state out of Iraq would just as logically be applied to Turkey. And the first Iraq war was fought to preserve a thoroughly artificial border between Kuwait and Iraq. There's no ethnic difference between Kuwaitis and Iraqis - they're all Arabs, and both sides of the border have a mix of Shiites and Sunnis. Same thing with Saudi Arabia, the eastern provinces of which that abut Iraq and Kuwait are largely Shiite, just like southern Iraq. Once you start saying that we're going to re-draw borders to make more ethnic "sense" it's not clear where you stop, or why, and much of the underpinning of our international system (such as it is) falls away.


Indeed, which is why the Kosovo War of 1999 was so strange: Kosovo was universally recognized as part of Yugoslavia (i.e., Serbia) and, under the Abraham Lincoln precedent, Yugoslavia certainly had the right to forcibly put down an armed rebellion within its own territory. But, that was not allowed by NATO. But then neither has been the natural alternative -- for Kosovo to become an independent state.


One interesting thing about the breakup of Yugoslavia in terms of how people in the West reacted is the weird alliances that were formed. For example: the two groups who were most sympathetic to the Serbs (apart from ethnic Russians and, of course, ethnic Serbs) were paleocons and right-wing Jews.

Right-wing Jews saw an analogy between the situation of the Serbs and the situation of the Israelis. Both felt historically persecuted (and by some of the same people); both were now trying to hold on to maximum territory in a situation where geographic contiguity was elusive (Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria versus the Serbs in Krajina); and both were specifically trying to reclaim a holy territory (Kosovo for the Serbs, Jerusalem and its environs for the Jews) that was now dominated by an alien - and Muslim - ethnic group. Yasser Arafat saw the analogy as well; in fact, he proclaimed more than once in the wake of Kosovo that the West was now obligated by analogy to defend the Palestinian Arabs against the Israelis just as they defended the Kosovar Albanians against the Serbs. This probably had an impact on his unwillingness to come to some kind of a deal with Ehud Barak.

Paleocons identified with the Serbs not so much, I think, because of anything intrinsic about the Serbs or their situation but because they saw the West's war against Serbia as emblematic of Western and American meddling in a part of the world in which we had no justification for sticking our noses. The New World Order was being forged in the war against Serbia, and since they knew they were against the NWO that meant they were for whoever the NWO was fighting. But I remember reading all sorts of paleocon stuff in the late 1990s that crossed way over from antipathy to our involvement to active enthusiasm for the Serb cause. Which was, frankly, bizarre.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, the two groups most sympathetic to the Bosnian Muslims were left-wing Jews and Muslim fanatics. Susan Sontag flew to Sarajevo to put on a performance of Waiting for Godot, and Osama bin Laden was smuggling guns to the Sarajevo government. Go figure.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Who said this in 1995?

The greatly increased ratio of low-cost labor to capital has raised the wages of highly skilled labor and the return on physical capital but has put downward pressure on the wages of low-skilled labor. The result has been a sharp widening in the differential between the wages of highly skilled and low-skilled labor in the United States and other advanced countries.

If the widening of the wage differential is allowed to proceed unchecked, it threatens to create within our own country a social problem of major proportions. We shall not be willing to see a group of our population move into Third World conditions at the same time that another group of our population becomes increasingly well off. Such stratification is a recipe for social disaster. The pressure to avoid it by protectionist and other similar measures will be irresistible.

He went on to argue for reforming education by implementing a voucher system. While that's probably a good idea, the obvious first step for fixing public education is to stop making it worse. Our education problems would be more manageable if we cut down on the number of illegal aliens imported, which would reduce the number of Spanish-speaking students from a culture that doesn't care much about education.

In general, this is a good argument for my "libertarianism in one country" theory -- that, politically speaking, you can choose to have either a globalized market for low wage labor within your country or you can choose to have relatively few restrictions on the free market within your country, but you definitely can't choose both.

I wrote in 2001:

This is what libertarians must realize: There is staggeringly too much inequality in the world for America's love affair with capitalism to survive importing massive amounts of it...

It's crucial to understand that a hankering for equality is not some fad instigated by Marxist college professors. It is deeply rooted in human nature. Just see what happens when you try to give one of your kids a smaller slice of the pie than you give the others.

America's exceptional devotion to free enterprise was based on our being blessed with a nearly empty continent, populated only by Indians who, while brave and tenacious, were ultimately too thin on the ground to hang on to their property. Throughout American history, cheap land and high wages made possible a degree of equality of land ownership impossible to achieve in Europe without heavy government intervention. Even though 19th Century Great Britain enjoyed a higher degree of social mobility than was typical in Europe, around 250 families owned about 3/4ths of the real estate in the entire country. Today, after generations of punitive death duties, the Duke of Westminster still owns about 10% of London.

Socialism didn't happen here because we didn't need it to happen.

The eternal temptation of the wealthy, however, is to try to acquire cheap labor in order to grow even richer.

Answer: Milton Friedman. (Via Catallaxy).


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The March 27th issue

of The American Conservative:



Hillary the Hawk

By Justin Raimondo
A second President Clinton would lead the Democratic wing of the War Party.



Mission Improbable

By Scott McConnell
Much as they may want war with Iran, neoconservatives concede that forceable regime change isn’t feasible.

Six Ports and a Storm
By Leon Hadar
The Jacksonian populists who fight Bush’s war reject his Dubai deal.

Race War Behind Bars
By Roger D. McGrath
Los Angeles’ black-brown race war goes to jail.

Cheney of Command

By James Bovard
Claiming the right to declassify on his whim, the vice president becomes a law unto himself.

The Radical Lasch

By Jeremy Beer
Social historian Christopher Lasch was both a radical and a conservative.

Downhill Olympics

By Diana Moon
Dude, where’s my Olympics?

Suburban Commandos
By William Norman Grigg
Militarized police treat America like Fallujah.



From Russia With Blood

By Steve Sailer
Russian vampires in “Night Watch”

An Empire Built of Paper
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis
by William Bonner and Addison Wiggin

Purchase an online edition of this issue immediately!

The Reverse of the Medal
By G. Tracy Mehan III
Patrick O’Brian: The Making of the Novelist by Nikolai Tolstoy

Counterfeit Conservative

By Doug Bandow
Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy
by Bruce Bartlett



Are We Up to the Empire Game?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Bush discredits Arab democracy.

Ugly Americans on the March
By Taki
Why I cheered for Finland



Fourteen Days: National Review Purges Buckley; Do the Troops Support the Troops?; Free Speech Hits Its Limit in Austria

Deep Background: Suicide Bomber University; Abandoning Abbas; Iran Bombs the Dollar


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Middle Eastern cousin marriage at work

The NYT reports

A Hunt for Genes That Betrayed a Desert People
Dina Kraft

Until recently their ancestors were nomads who roamed the deserts of the Middle East and, as tradition dictated, often married cousins. Marrying within the family helped strengthen bonds among extended families struggling to survive the desert. But after centuries this custom of intermarriage has had devastating genetic effects.

Bedouins do not carry more genetic mutations than the general population. But because so many marry relatives — some 65 percent of Bedouin in Israel's Negev marry first or second cousins — they have a significantly higher chance of marrying someone who carries the same mutations, increasing the odds they will have children with genetic diseases, researchers say. Hundreds have been born with such diseases among the Negev Bedouin in the last decade.

The plight of the community is being addressed by an unusual scientific team: Dr. Ohad Birk, a Jewish Israeli geneticist, and two physicians, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian from the Gaza Strip, and Dr. Khalil Elbedour, himself a Bedouin from Israel.

Why do the Bedu have such high rates of cousin marriage? I wrote:

Another important motivation -- one that is particularly important in many herding cultures, such as the ancients ones from which the Jews and Muslims emerged -- is to prevent inheritable wealth from being split among too many descendents. This can be especially important when there are economies of scale in the family business.

Just as the inbred have fewer unique ancestors than the outbred, they also have fewer unique heirs, helping keep both the inheritance and the brothers together. When a herd-owning patriarch marries his son off to his younger brother's daughter, he insures that his grandson and his grandnephew will be the same person. Likewise, the younger brother benefits from knowing that his grandson will also be the patriarch's grandson and heir. Thus, by making sibling rivalry over inheritance less relevant, cousin marriage emotionally unites families.

The anthropologist Carleton Coon also pointed out that by minimizing the number of relatives a Bedouin Arab nomad has, this system of inbreeding "does not overextend the number of persons whose deaths an honorable man must avenge."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Berkeley psychologist: whiny kids grow up to be conservatives

I haven't read the study, but I'll interject in italics possible translations from Berkeley-speak:


How to spot a baby conservative
Kurt Kleiner
Toronto Star

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals. ...

In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity. [In other words, they are heterosexuals.]

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose [i.e., not searching for gainful employment and living in their parents' garages], turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests [mescaline, Grateful Dead music, tying bandanas around their dogs' necks, etc.]. The girls were still outgoing [i.e., slept around a lot, with both sexes], but the young men tended to turn a little introspective [i.e., unmanly and beaten down psychologically by Berkeley's political correctness]...

There was a .27 correlation between being self-reliant in nursery school and being a liberal as an adult. Another way of saying it is that self-reliance predicts statistically about 7 per cent of the variance between kids who became liberal and those who became conservative.


A reader replies:


Maybe you suburban kids missed it, but we "townies" from college towns saw right through this Berkeley study.


"...the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints?"


Gee, this 3-year-old "conservative" sounds an awful lot like a 33-year-old liberal.


"Chances are he grew up to be a conservative."


No, chances are he grew up... period!


Perhaps liberals are people who peaked in nursery school, and thus want to turn the rest of the world into a giant nursery school.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Charles Manson praises WSJ's defense of Iraq War"

That hasn't happened (so far as I know), but it would be no more lame-brained a headline than this headline on James Taranto's "Best of the Web" blog at the WSJ OpinionJournal website:

"David Duke praises a Harvard scholar's views on Israel."

The New York Sun reports on the latest trouble in Cambridge:

A paper recently co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government about the allegedly far-reaching influence of an "Israel lobby" is winning praise from white supremacist David Duke.

The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization.

But the paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by the Kennedy School's Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, is meeting with a more critical reception from many of those it names as part of the lobby. The 83-page "working paper" claims a network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq. Included in this network, the authors say, are the editors of the New York Times, the scholars at the Brookings Institution, students at Columbia, "pro-Israel" senior officials in the executive branch, and "neoconservative gentiles" including columnist George Will.

Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, called the paper "a great step forward," but he said he was "surprised" that the Kennedy School would publish the report.

Is that pathetic, or what? Two scholars put together a lengthy analysis and the best the NY Sun can come up with is to email David Duke and get his endorsement of it. And then Taranto repeats it! It's just embarrassing...

(Here's an evenhanded summary of the report from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. As I've often pointed out, some Israeli newspapers and American newspapers aimed purely at a Jewish audience, such as The Forward, do a much better job of covering potentially embarrassing issues like this than either the American mainstream media or neocon agitprop mouthpieces like the NY Sun and the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page.)

The ultimate responsibility for the Iraq Attaq lies within the opaque psyches of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Clearly, however, the Israel Lobby was the main cheerleader. The funny thing is that while the Israel Lobby in America was crazy for the war, the Israeli government itself was more ambivalent. As well they should be. As I wrote a few days after Paul Wolfowitz called for invading Iraq four days after 9/11:

The neo-conservatives need to wake up to realize that if America really takes up the Imperial Burden in the Middle East like the Wolfowitz Wing is demanding, then America's special relationship with Israel is history. Support for Israel is purely a matter of domestic idealism. The American institution that thinks in the broad picture - the State Department - has always found Israel to be a nuisance.

The more the U.S. becomes responsible for running the whole Mid East, the more of an inconvenience Israel becomes. Republics can indulge warm and idealistic commitments precisely because their foreign entanglements are limited in number; empires must be cold and calculating because their burdens are so manifold.

As George Orwell pointed out in "Shooting the Elephant," imperialism winds up being much less fun than you thought it would be -- you wind up being, in some ways, the servant of the masses you nominally rule. And if the masses you rule want you to shoot the elephant, or to prove you don't like Israel either, well, in the long run it's hard to keep saying no.

The neocons are trying desperately to have their cake and eat it too -- to make America an imperial presence in the Muslim world at the service of Israel. And if they have to compare anyone who questions them to David Duke to get away with it, well, intellectually humiliating themselves in the service of demonizing dissenters is a price they are more than willing to pay.

This little brouhaha raises a more general issue.

I'm one of the very few conservatives who takes identity politics seriously. Most identity politics warriors are liars and/or fools, but the emotions they feel are very real, and are a very normal part of human nature. When typical conservatives like Jonah Goldberg denounce anyone for even thinking about identity politics, well, in response to this kind of unilateral intellectual disarmament, I can only echo Trotsky's great statement about war: You may not be interested in identity politics, but identity politics is interested in you.

I'm not a terribly emotionally intuitive person, so to understand other people well enough to get along in life, I have to go through a conscious, rational process of putting myself in somebody else's shoes. I try to think about what incentives they face, what emotions they feel, what skills and weaknesses they have, and so forth.

Over the years, I've taught myself to be fairly insightful at thinking like gays, lesbians, women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and the other usual identity politics categories. But the most important category for thinking about intellectual life and ideology, and one of the most important for thinking about politics, culture, and foreign policy, is by far the most complicated identity category to comprehend well: Jews.

One reason is because in 21st Century America, you aren't supposed to think about Jews as an identity politics category. You really aren't supposed to think about them at all. So, you don't get much help from the media in understanding this hugely influential group.

Moreover, the complexity of Jewish identity politics is quite boggling. Where does this contradictoriness stem from? The difficulty and relative uniqueness of the Jewish historical predicament combine explosively with the Jewish cultural emphases on intellectual creativity, argumentation as test of manhood, and the supremacy of ideas over practicality to create a vast outpouring of ideologies, all of them fundamentally tied to profound Jewish concerns, but many of them at odds with each other. There are no pan-Jewish conspiracies as paranoid anti-Semites assume because Jews are the least likely to agree with each other. But, Jewish identity politics still has a sizable impact that needs to be understood.

The complexity of Jewish identity politics helps create easy rhetorical trump cards for persuading people that there is nothing to think about. Just move along, folks, nothing here to think about. A classic is: "How can Jews be disproportionately both capitalists and Communists? Huh? Huh?" But, of course, historically they have been both, and the interaction between the two has been of world historical importance.

Going back to the 1840s, many of the world's intellectual concerns, and going back to 1917 many of the world's political conflagrations, have been driven by the often contradictory needs and obsessions of Jews.

As Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine pointed out in The Jewish Century, Marxism appealed to educated secular Jews because it promised to dissolve the Jewish problem. Jews were resented for being so good at capitalism, so intellectuals Jews were excited that Communism would destroy capitalism. They were discriminated against because of religion, so Communism would abolish religion. They were discriminated against because they had no national homeland, so Communism would eliminate nationalism. What's not to like? And, indeed, as promised, secular educated Jews flourished under Soviet Communism for the first two or three decades.

Freudianism made little sense outside of the framework of bourgeois Jewish Mitteleuropean family structures (and not much there either), but Jewish intellectuals needed Jewish intellectual heroes, so Freud's silly waste of time was inflicted on the world for a half century.

Boasian cultural anthropology, the Frankfurt School, and numerous other intellectual cults are most profitably analyzed in Jewish terms.

Even a largely beneficial ideological phenomenon like Milton Friedman's Chicago School of free market economics is heavily based on the sensible post-Marxian realization that if Jews are good at capitalism, well, then capitalism is good for the Jews.

Neoconservatism began in the 1960s as a rebellion by Catholic and Jewish social scientists who saw that liberalism was unleashing black crime and rioting on white urban ethnics like themselves and their relatives. Over time, though, Catholic concerns got marginalized, and the hard work of crunching data got dropped. Neoconservatism turned into a front for pushing conservative Jewish foreign policy concerns. Francis Fukuyama finally figured out that he was being used to promote somebody else's agenda, but poor Victor Davis Hanson will likely never quite get it.

The problem is that Jewish intellectuals, for all their energy and ideological creativity, tend to be poor pragmatic decisionmakers about what actually is good for the Jews. They tend to get emotionally attached to the new ideas they've made up, push them too far, and don't understand how their ideas sound to others outside their hothouse.

For example, many neocons were enthusiastic for the Kosovo War of 1999 without ever realizing how it would backfire on Israel. I wrote in 2002:

Why has Europe turned so sharply against Israel in the last couple of years [since the beginning of the Second Intifada]? One overlooked factor is that Europeans see a distinct analogy between the West Bank and Kosovo. Consider: in 1997 a Muslim intifada began in Serbian (technically, Yugoslavian) owned Kosovo. In Kosovo, Muslims outnumbered Serbs about 2 million to 200,000, which is quite similar to the ratio in the West Bank. Legalistically, the Serbs had a better claim to Kosovo than the Israelis do to the West Bank, since "Yugoslavia's" sovereignty over Kosovo was universally recognized around the world. Further, the Serb population in Kosovo were not new settlers, but the rump of what had once been a larger Serbian population, which had been leaving as illegal Muslim immigrants poured in from Albania in recent decades.

The Muslim intifada in Kosovo was battled by Serbian troops, with about 2000 deaths total on both sides over the next two years. In 1999, NATO, led by the U.S., demanded an end to Serbian attempts to put down the rebellion in their sovereign territory of Kosovo. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright even demanded the Serbs agree to allow NATO to invade non-Kosovo Serbia. When the Serbs refused, NATO bombed Belgrade. Subsequently, the Serbs began throwing vast numbers of Muslims out of Kosovo. (There has been an enormous amount of lying about the order in which these events occurred over the last three years, as the aggressors try to rewrite history to make it seem as if the bombing was a response to Serbian ethnic cleansing, not the trigger. At the time, however, no one disputed that NATO struck first.) NATO proceeded to bomb Serbia's cities back into the industrial stone age. The Serbs eventually surrendered and NATO occupied Kosovo. Most of the Serbs and Gypsies were then ethnically cleansed from Kosovo by the triumphant Muslims.

All of this was accompanied by a vast campaign of ethnic hatred in Western Europe and America aimed at the Serbs and their elected leader Milosevic. You may recall the Newsweek cover photo of Miloscevic and the headline "The Face of Evil." Serbs have become Hollywood's all-purpose bad guys, as seen in "Bad Company" and "Behind Enemy Lines."

Now, is it all that surprising considering this recent history that so many Europeans see the Israelis as the Serbs and the Palestinians as the Kosovo Albanians? You say that the Israelis were slaughtered by the Nazis in WWII, so that makes things different? Well, try asking a Serb about what the Nazis and their Croatian allies did to the Serbs in WWII. Better hit the bathroom first, though, because you'll be there a long time. In reality, the Jewish losses were at least an order of magnitude larger. Still, Israelis and Serbs have long been sympathetic to each other because of their common victimization during WWII. Tel Aviv was quite sympathetic to Belgrade during the 1999 war.

Granted, there are major differences between Milosevic and Sharon. For example, Milosevic was indirectly responsible for a massacre of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs that killed 7,000. The massacres that Sharon was indirectly or directly responsible for were one or two orders of magnitude smaller - the massacres of 800 or so Palestinians by Sharon's Christian Lebanese allies in 1982, and the massacre of 69 people in a Palestinian village by Sharon's Israeli army unit in 1953.

Personally, I argued strenuously at the time that the demonization of the Serbs was disastrous for the understanding how to prevent future conflagrations like the one that has engulfed the Balkans for the last eleven years. The Balkan wars were not caused by any race or person being exceptionally "evil." No, the violence was caused by a fundamental human problem that can happen anywhere. (See my National Post essay on the subject.) Fortunately, it can be managed, but only if we drop the intellectually lazy assumption that one side or the other is inherently evil.

The Balkan wars were caused by the collapse in 1991 of the "settled distribution of property." With the central Communist government of Yugoslavia gone, property rights because highly unsettled. People feared losing their property if they ended up on the wrong side of the new borders. So, they teamed up with their kin to try to preserve their property, and to prevent future threats to their property by driving their non-kin away.

Likewise, the distribution of property west of the Jordan River has been unsettled ever since WWI, when the Ottoman Empire was defeated, but the victorious British had made contradictory promises to both the Arabs and the Jews.

But this kind of dispassionate analysis seems to be something American neo-conservatives are largely incapable of. The same crew - Kristol, Kagan, etc. - who were beating the war drums for crushing Serbia's attempt to put down the intifada in Kosovo are baffled that Europeans might apply the same analysis to Israel's attempt to put down the intifada in the West Bank. Don't the Europeans realize, Kristol and Co. ask, that the Palestinians are evil? Don't they understand Moral Clarity? How could they not grasp this simple truth: Israelis Good - Palestinians Bad. Maybe the Europeans are evil, too! Yeah, that's the ticket. Everybody is Evil except for whomever is on my side!


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

African IQ

Dennis Mangan writes:

As anecdotal evidence for Steve's thesis, I'll just point out that while living in Sierra Leone for nearly two years, I encountered lots of people who were playing with much less than a full deck. Leaving aside the genetics, it's readily discerned that the environment played a huge role. Just about everyone is ill in some form or another just about all the time, and the reader will know how being ill affects mental wattage. A partial list of diseases that I personally dealt with there (I ran a hospital laboratory) would include: schistosomiasis; hookworm disease, which is the leading cause of iron deficiency anemia there; various other helminthic intestinal parasites; onchocerciasis, which causes "river blindness", the leading form of loss of sight in Africa; amoebic dysentery; malaria; tuberculosis; lymphatic filariasis, which can lead to elephantiasis; not to mention the ubiquitous skin and wound infections, diarrhea, etc., that people deal with daily.

On health grounds alone, IQ must be drastically affected, and with it the African economy.

I had lots of friends in Sierra Leone, and naturally I don't go around thinking of them as dumb as rocks. There were Africans in competent positions, for example as the lead nurse at the hospital. But facing the facts, most of them weren't so bright, and it's not a lack of education that makes them appear so.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

NCAA Basketball News

Redick, Morrison To Share 'Larry Bird Trophy For Certain Intangibles'

INDIANAPOLIS—Duke's J.J. Redick and Gonzaga's Adam Morrison joined previous honorees Christian Laettner, Keith Van Horn, and Shawn Bradley Tuesday as co-recipients of the Larry Bird Trophy, which recognizes "certain athletes" each year for possessing "that particular quality" which "really sets them apart" from almost 80 percent of all other basketball players. "In this sport, it's very unusual to find two great players of their…uh, let's see, how should I put it…'stripe,'" said college-basketball analyst Digger Phelps, who immediately asked that his previous statement be stricken from the record. "They really…hmm… You see, not a lot of players are even qualified for this award, you know, in the sense that… Well, let's just hope that, if and when these guys are starting in the NBA, they are able to compete with the league's other more athletic, instinctual…folks." This marks the first time that there have been two winners of the Bird Trophy since 1993, when Bobby Hurley and half of Jason Kidd shared the award.

The Onion


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More fun with IQ and the Wealth of Nations

A reader has updated and expanded the analysis of the factors behind variations in national differences in per capita GDP pioneered by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in IQ and the Wealth of Nations. He finds a very close fit with a model four explanatory factors (average IQ, economic freedom, oil production per capita, and membership in either the European Union or NAFTA), and he discusses the remaining outliers.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A reader responds:

1. Corruption is perfectly compatible with economic development. If we take 1965 as a starting point, then countries like Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Indonesia and India all made considerable economic progress since then, but all five are quite far from being squeaky clean. If corruption prevents economic progress in Africa, then it must be because it is quantitatively and qualitatively different from corruption in the 5 countries mentioned above. If that is so, it raises the obvious question why African corruption is worse than elsewhere. It has to be a reflection of African culture. We are left with two alternatives: either African corruption is worse than in other parts of the world or else it is not the cause of Africa's failure to develop.

2. The explanation provided by the Economics student doesn't really address the question. He explained why economists don't do research and write articles on immigration, not why they ignore fundamental economic principles in their public statements about immigration.

My explanation is that economics is essentially a liberal discipline. All its assumptions are about individuals, households and firms maximizing their utility without regard to collective well-being. The core assumption of economic liberalism is that individuals acting separately in their own interest will produce better results than individuals acting collectively. Immigration is a case in which individuals, both the immigrants and those who employ them, by acting separately can produce a result that is detrimental to the interest of the majority of the collectivity that receives the immigrants. When we talk about collectivities, we should of course specify which collectivity we have in mind and not overlook the fact that different individuals within the collectivity can have different interests. That brings us in political territory, which economists might want to avoid.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March Madness -- Maybe it's not so mad after all

The press is full of its annual men-bite-dogs accounts of all the upsets in the NCAA college basketball tournament, but when you look at the big picture over the last 20 years, you can see that the regular-season rich generally get richer in the post-season. And that has implications for how to bet in office pools if you don't know anything about college basketball.

(Some background: The NCAA divides the 64 teams qualifying for the tournament into four regions of 16 teams apiece. In each region, colleges are seeded from #1 to #16. In the first round, #1 plays #16, while #2 plays #15, and so forth. In the second round, the winner of #1 versus #16 (which 88 times out of 88 games has been #1) plays the winner of #8 versus #9, and so on. Losers go home. Eventually, the four winners of each Regional meet in the fifth round (semifinals), and the two winners play for the championship in the 6th round.)

The graph above shows that the actual results come out about as you'd expect from the seedings. There are anomalies -- for example, #6-seeded teams have outperformed #5-seeded teams, but generally the curve is pretty smooth. This is partly a tribute to the good work down by the NCAA seeding committee, and partly an inevitable outcome of the bracket. For example, the #1 teams are almost guaranteed at least one victory because #16 teams are so bad -- they are generally teams that are in the tournament solely because the NCAA has an obligation to take the winner of their obscure conference, no matter how awful the winner is. In contrast, #15s are often mildly competitive (although they are more likely to scare #2s than beat them), while #14s are usually pretty decent teams that often have a fighting chance against #3s.

So, next year when you get pressured to enter the office March Madness pool even though you don't know anything about basketball, you can be assured of a respectable showing if you just pick the higher seeded team in each game. (When you get to the final four, then pick among your four #1s based on the end-of-the-season AP poll rankings.) If the pool gives one point for each victory, you'll do quite well and will impress your co-workers with your quiet basketball expertise. Unfortunately, most pools give much heavier weights to later games, so this strategy doesn't work as well, but you'll still do better than average (on average).

In other words, the seedings are a fairly efficient market. And even if you can find mistakes in the seedings, well, the bracket tends to cover up the mistakes. Like doctors, the NCAA seeding committee often buries its mistakes. Say you know that team X shouldn't have gotten only a #13 seed, that it's really good enough to be a #9 seed. If it had been seeded #9, it would have been matched in the first round with a #8 seed, and it would have had close to a 50% chance of winning the game. But because it was unfairly relegated to #13, it gets stuck playing a #4 seed in the first round, and most likely loses even if it plays well enough to beat a #8 seed.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 20, 2006

Colby Cosh's "The Terror" -- An Attempt at a Definition

This may not be what Colby had in mind, but here's my idea of a definition of an athlete who is a "terror" -- a one dimensional athlete who can humiliate or physically hurt opponents real bad with that one skill. The prototypical terror might have been boxer George Foreman in 1973-74, the awesome peacher who destroyed Joe Frazier with his punching power and shocked Ali in the first round of the Rumble in the Jungle with how hard he hit. But could be beat if you could avoid his one skill. During his comeback in the 1990s, when he won a share of heavyweight crown at age 45, he was much less of a terror, but much more of a boxer.

A terror in baseball might be a slugger like Dave Kingman, Gorman Thomas, or Rob Deer who will strike out or hit a homer.

You may not remember Roscoe Tanner in tennis back in the 1970s, but he had an incredible serve and could make better all-around players look bad when it was working.

A pitcher who can throw 100 mph, but without much control would be a terror -- Sandy Koufax or Nolan Ryan early in their careers. The Yankees had one of the first terror relief pitchers, Ryne Duren, who wore thick glasses and put on a big act about how he couldn't really see all the way to home plate and was just as likely to bean you as throw a strike because the whole world was a blur to thim.

The concept can probably be extended to acting. I just saw the new Sam Shepard movie, "Don't Come Knocking," in which his performance is quite inadequate. I compared it to how good he was as Chuck Yeager in "The Right Stuff." Perhaps he's a terror, capable of an iconic performance in a very narrow range of roles, but out of his depth otherwise. In comedy, you could think of Michael Richards as Kramer on "Seinfeld."

In acting, perhaps a "terror" is the same as a "scene stealer."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Don't Come Knocking"

There's some big name talent in this indie snooze. The screenplay by Sam Shepard, who also stars as a burnt-out Hollywood cowboy actor (think Kris Kristofferson) tracking down the son he fathered in Montana while filming the equivalent of "Heaven's Gate." It's directed by Wim Wenders, who was a top art house director in the 1980s with "Paris, Texas" (screenplay by Shephard) and the wonderful "Wings of Desire" (guardian angels along the Berlin Wall). Jessica Lange, Shepard's girlfriend, plays the mother of his son.

But, it doesn't really work and I suspect it won't get much attention. A big problem is that Sam Shepard, who looked like the second coming of Gary Cooper in "The Right Stuff" as Chuck Yeager, has lost his looks, and he's not enough of an actor to carry the movie without them. Plus the plot has lots of holes in it. Shepard's mytho-symbolic stagewriting style just looks goofy when filmed.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My new VDARE.com column: "Undercover Economist Underperforms On Why Poor Countries Are Poor."

"Undercover Economist Underperforms On Why Poor Countries Are Poor." An excerpt:

Tim Harford has a new book out called The Undercover Economist that offers a fairly good introduction to economics. (I reviewed it in the New York Post.) Now, Reason magazine's website is running a chapter from the book describing Harford's visit to Cameroon in West Africa under the headline "Why Poor Countries Are Poor." Harford begins:

"They call Douala the 'armpit of Africa.' Lodged beneath the bulging shoulder of West Africa, this malaria-infested city in southwestern Cameroon is humid, unattractive, and smelly."

That reminds me of an old friend from Douala, the largest city in Cameroon, who was getting his Ph.D. at UCLA a quarter of a century ago. On the rare occasions when the July temperature in Westwood reached 90 degrees, he'd complain bitterly about how hot it was. When I'd point out that his hometown was just north of the equator and it had to be 90 degrees there every day, he'd respond:

"Ah, but, Steven, you don't understand. That is the soooooothing African heat."

So, while Cameroon might seem like an armpit to you, me, or Tim Harford, to 16 million Cameroonians, it's home. And I wish them well.

Harford's explanation for Why Poor Countries Are Poor is corrupt and predatory government and other institutions, which he documents with many depressing examples from his visit.

He goes on to make the ambitious claim:

"It is not news that corruption and perverse incentives matter. But perhaps it is news that the problem of twisted rules and institutions explains not just a little bit of the gap between Cameroon and rich countries but almost all of the gap."

Well, yes, that is indeed news to me. For one thing, there are obvious noninstitutional problems with trying to get work done in Cameroon, such as endemic malaria and all that soothing African heat that just makes you want to lie down and take a nap.

But Harford's assertion raises an obvious question: how can he know "why poor countries are poor" from inspecting just one of them? Wouldn't it also be useful to compare countries?

Surely, a few of the dozens of sub-Saharan African countries must have better policies and institutions than Cameroon and thus must have closed "almost all of the gap"?
[More]


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The real Larry Summers scandal?

I've written maybe 10,000 words in defense of Harvard President Lawrence Summers's much-denounced speech last year on why women haven't achieved gender equality with men in elite universities' math, science, and engineering departments. But that doesn't mean he's without flaw. Indeed, it looks like Summers was peripherally involved in the Scandal of the Century, the looting of post-Soviet Russia, or at least he dragged Harvard through the legal mud in a misguided attempt to protect a close friend who had gone over to the dark side.

Back in 1993, my elderly father would rant that those Harvard consultants who were advising the Yeltsin government on liberalizing the post-Soviet economy were ripping off the Russian people. Being a true believer back then in the Magic of the Free Market, I pooh-poohed his concerns.

Well, my dad was right and I was wrong. We all understand the superiority of the free market these days, but in any kind of market, it still matters very much who owns what. The "reform" of the Russian economy turned out to be one of the great larceny sprees in all history, and the Harvard boys weren't all merely naive theoreticians. Veteran economics journalist David Warsh's EconomicPrincipals.com reported in 2004:

The US government's long-running wrangle with economist Andrei Shleifer and Harvard University over Harvard's ill-fated Russia Project in the 1990s was resolved last week, in the government's favor.

A Federal judge ruled that, by quietly investing on their own accounts while advising the Russian government, Harvard professor Shleifer and his Moscow-based assistant Jonathan Hay had conspired to defraud the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which had been paying their salary.


Harvard had to pay $26 million and Shleifer $2 million in fines.

The Russian-born 45-year-old Shleifer is a superstar of the economics profession. Like Summers, he is the winner of the Clark Medal, the award for top economist under 40. Shleifer became the editor of Harvard's Quarterly Journal of Economics at the age of 28, and is now editor of the American Economic Association's Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Warsh's website reported in 2003:


"Then, too, Shleifer's oldest friend in economics is Lawrence Summers -- who, first as Undersecretary of Treasury for International Affairs, then as Deputy Secretary, was to all intents and purposes his ultimate boss during the period of the alleged transgressions, even though they were separated by several layers of governmental hierarchy."


Summers and Shleifer have vacationed together each year.

Recently, Institutional Investor printed a long expose by investigative reporter David McClintick (author of Indecent Exposure on movie executive/criminal David Begelman, who forged actor Cliff Robertson's name on checks) that begins:


How Harvard lost Russia

Source: Institutional Investor Magazine, Americas and International Editions
David McClintick

The best and brightest of America's premier university came to Moscow in the 1990s to teach Russians how to be capitalists. This is the inside story of how their efforts led to scandal and disgrace.

Since being named president of Harvard University in 2001, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers has sparked a series of controversies that have grabbed headlines. Summers incurred the wrath of African-Americans when he belittled the work of controversial religion professor Cornel West (who left for Princeton University); last year he infuriated faculty and students alike when he seemed to disparage the innate scientific abilities of women at a Massachusetts economic conference, igniting a national uproar that nearly cost him his job; last fall brought the departure of Jack Meyer, the head of Harvard Management Co., which oversees the school's endowment but had inflamed some in the community because of the multimillion-dollar salaries it pays some of its managers.

Then, in quiet contrast, there is the case of economics professor Andrei Shleifer, who in the mid-1990s led a Harvard advisory program in Russia that collapsed in disgrace. In August, after years of litigation, Harvard, Shleifer and others agreed to pay at least $31 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the U.S. government. Harvard had been charged with breach of contract, Shleifer and an associate, Jonathan Hay, with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.

Shleifer remains a faculty member in good standing. Colleagues say that is because he is a close longtime friend and collaborator of Summers.

In the following pages investigative journalist David McClintick, a Harvard alumnus, chronicles Shleifer's role in the university's Russia Project and how his friendship with Summers has protected him from the consequences of that debacle inside America's premier academic institution.


Summers's enemies within the Harvard faculty circulated copies of this article just before his resignation. (And here's another article by Warsh on Summers's costly defense of Shleifer.)

Warsh writes:


How did the defendants in the Russia project --Harvard, Shleifer, Hay and, though he was not charged with wrong-doing in the matter, Summers -- convince the [New York] Times, the [Washington] Post and the Financial Times that the collapse of [Harvard's] Russia Project was not a worthy story? What did they say, and how did they say it? To whom, and how often? Let me stress that there is absolutely no question of actual money ever changing hands -- of bribery. At the pinnacles of capitalism, the influence exchange is so deep and liquid that cash is almost never required, except, perhaps, within organizations, in the form of golden handshakes and the like.

Instead, the informal economy of capitalism is one of deference and respect, of favors today and the implicit promise of favors later, of jobs and dinner invitations and admissions to exclusive kindergartens.... Anyone who doubts that this informal economy extends to newspapers knows nothing about how newspapers work.

For at its heart, the Shleifer matter has always had less to do with the failure to export American values to Russia than with the inadvertent importation of Moscow rules to institutions in the United States. That's why Harvard's cockeyed defense is so alarming, why Shleifer's elevation to positions of ever-greater authority in the economics profession is worrisome. No one doubts that he is an original and productive economic thinker. The good news is that it was Shleifer who, as editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, published McMillan and Zoido's article on Montesinos [the corrupt Peruvian spymaster who paid much higher prices to suborn media owners than judges or politicians]. That's the bad news, too, since the editorship confers vast and global favor-trading power.

The worst thing of all is that, starting with his long-time mentor Larry Summers, Sheifer's friends don't seem to understand that they failed the young Russian émigré in the first instance, that they in turn have been betrayed and embarrassed. It is true, as Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin write in their introduction to the forthcoming "Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's Economic History" that the United States "changed from a place where political bribery was a routine event infecting politics at all levels to a nation that now ranks among the least corrupt in the world." But it is also true that American aid-giving abroad in the 20th century (Herbert Hoover, George C. Marshall, Creighton Abrams) has been remarkably free of high level corruption -- until now.


Why didn't the press do a good job of covering Russian corruption and the Harvard scandal? Well, who was disproportionately involved in the corruption at both the Russian and Harvard ends? I, for one, had no idea until I read Amy Chua's 2003 book World on Fire about "market dominant minorities," that six of the seven "oligarchs" who paid for Boris Yeltsin's 1996 re-election in return for the privilege of buying ex-Soviet properties at absurdly low prices (e.g., Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky was put in charge of auctioning off Yukos Oil, which owns about 2% of the world's oil reserves -- he sold it for $159 million to ... himself) were Jewish. (Five Jewish on both sides of the family, one on one side). And that's in a country where the Jewish population is about one percent.

For some reason, the American media hadn't been very enthusiastic about publishing that highly interesting fact in the seven years following the 1996 Russian election. We all saw what happened to Gregg Easterbrook in 2003 over a triviality, so you can understand why the reticence about this gigantic story.

As I've said before in the context of exploring how Scooter Libby could serve as a mob lawyer for international gangster Marc Rich on and off for 15 years and then move immediately into the job of chief of staff to the Vice President of the United States, the problem is not that Jews are inherently worse behaved (or better behaved) than any other human group, but that they have achieved for themselves in America in recent years a collective immunity from anything resembling criticism. And being immune to criticism doesn't make human beings behave better.

Now, Warsh's website writes:

Gangsta-nomics

Clarifying the impact of Harvard University's Russia scandal and the Andrei Shleifer/Lawrence Summers affair on the economics profession (generally) and on Harvard (in particular) will take years. The outlines of one mechanism, however, already can be discerned. Tracing its workings through offers clues to what may be the controversy's ultimate resolution.

Just as opening the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes produced both great economic benefits (the North American Midwest could export grains, iron ore, machinery to the world on ocean-going ships) and some undesirable side effects as well (the introduction into the lake system of lamprey eels and zebra mussels), so sending a team of Harvard University experts to advise the Russian government of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s improved markets in the former Soviet republic, but at the cost of importing to Harvard certain unattractive Russian folkways.

The most obvious of these is the tendency to view anti-Semitism as a powerful explanatory variable in the resignation of Harvard president Lawrence Summers.

Anti-Semitism was a puissant force at Harvard and most other American universities well into the 1950s, but has diminished dramatically in the past half-century, along with most other social concomitants of religious conviction/association. In Russia, it remains virulent. Harvard economic professor Shleifer, who grew up in Russia, often has been the victim of prejudice there. It has not harmed him in the US, nor his co-religionist Summers, especially in this instance.

Yet as Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam noted last week, Harvard professors Alan Dershowitz (law), Ruth Wisse (literature) and former lecturer Martin Peretz were quick to cite Summers' strong defense of Israel as a factor in what Dershowitz termed an "academic coup d'etat... by the die-hard left of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences." "The question I'm being asked," Wisse told Beam, (before praeteritio-otically dismissing it), "is, 'Was anti-Semitism the driving engine of the coup?'"

The traveler furthest down this road was Professor Edward Glaeser (economics), Shleifer's former pupil, long-standing friend and dogged defender, who told The Harvard Crimson that the act of circulating among the Harvard faculty an article in Institutional Investor by investigative reporter David McClintick was "a potent piece of hate creation -- not quite 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' but it's in that camp.""

So far-fetched was that comparison that Glaeser spent the week apologizing to all and sundry -- especially after an article in The New York Times acknowledged the generally high regard in which the McClintick article is held by asking rhetorically, in its headline, "Did an Exposé Help Sink Harvard's President?"

I vaguely suspect, judging from the title "Gangsta-nomics" that Warsh might be trying to hint at something beyond what he explicitly says: that pro-Semitism was a motivating factor among many of Summers's most prominent advocates and may have had something to do with the mainstream media's reluctance to touch the issue of Harvard's role in Russian corruption.

Steven Pinker, who has become much more objective about Jewish issues in this decade, is an honorable exception -- he was clearly outraged by the ludicrous controversy over Summers's statements about sex differences.

But sex differences between men and women just aren't a strongly motivating political factor for most people -- lesbians being the main exception. We almost all have loved ones of the opposite sex, so the corruption of feminist academics who rip off universities isn't all that motivating -- after all, if Larry Summers has to promise $50 million worth of gender preferences for women to make up for his faux pas, well, who knows, maybe your sister or wife or mom or daughter or daughter-in-law will get a job she doesn't really deserve under the Summers Reparations, so it's hard to get too worked up over it.

In contrast, ethno-racial politics are less likely to divide families into payees and payers the way gender preferences do, so they tend to elicit a lot more organized passion. Thus, many of Summers's most adamant defenders were most outraged not, like Pinker and myself, because he was getting railroaded for telling the truth about women and higher math, but because he told an arguable untruth about supporters of Harvard disinvesting in Israel -- that the movement is motivated by anti-Semitism. (In reality, many of the supporters of Harvard divesting investments in Israel are Jews themselves. Personally, I think Israel divestiture is a bad idea, but then I was against South African divestiture, too, and for the same reasons.)

Further, Warsh's elaborate analogy about zebra mussels coming up the St. Lawrence Seaway might not really be about American intellectual life being mildly tainted by the Russian Jewish rational tendency to blame anti-Semitism for their troubles, but about something much more serious: that American intellectual life might have been corrupted by the vast amounts of money the mostly Jewish Russian oligarchs had to toss around to American academics and public intellectuals.

We American intellectuals cannot be bought, but our affections can be rented for a lot less than, say, a second rate soccer player.

Jake Rudnitsky writes in the eXile about how cheaply American politicians can be bought:

American politicians prove that they can be bought for a song compared to their Russian counterparts, in spite of the fact that the US economy is about 5000 times larger.

While [Jack] Abramoff and his cohort Michael Scanlon have nothing to be ashamed of, thanks to their Abramovich-esque lavish spending habits, the amounts that the politicians were bought with are downright laughable. The highest netting congressman was Arizona's J.D. Hayworth, who came away with just $101,000 for his war chest: and now he's got to give it all back, meaning it was little more than an interest-free loan. More typical were the pols who netted somewhere in the mid-30s, including reps from NY, Michigan and Ohio. Now all that money - totaling about $4.5 million - is making its way to neutral charities. Bush, for example, picked the American Heart Association.

What else do they have to show for it? The memory of watching the Redskins or the Wizards endure another losing season from Abramoff's skyboxes? A few nice meals at one of his fancy-pants restaurants or, for DeLay, Abramoff's favorite, a weekend golf trip to Scotland? Golfing in Scotland! Can you imagine a Russian politician agreeing to so much as show up for a cup of coffee if the payoff is a *** golfing trip to a rain-soaked dump! It begs the question, what's the point of being corrupt if it doesn't make your life much better?

Compare, for a moment, Republicans' woeful attempt at abusing power with another corrupt politician currently in the headlines: Leonid Reiman, Russia's IT and telecommunications minister. The Wall Street Journal wrote him up about a week ago after they got an insider close to Reiman to admit that he's worth about a billion dollars.


If Duke Cunningham's the most corrupt politician in federal history (although I doubt it), think about how far you can get with public intellectuals for even less money!

A reader writes:


I will not be surprised if in fifty years historians judge Clinton/Summers/Harvard/Yeltsin/Oligarchs as a worse (more damaging) scandal than Bush/Oil/Texas/Enron.

I wonder when the Chinese will make their play in that market? Gotta do something with that trade imbalance.


Have you ever noticed that Beijing just plain deserves to own Taiwan?

Okay, that's a pretty lame argument, but I'm sure I could come up with more persuasive-sounding justifications than that for whatever Beijing wants ... but, I just don't feel motivated at the moment. Perhaps some motivation will show up in an envelope one of these days.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Why don't professional economists write sense about immigration?

A reader replies:

You keep asking why economists don't write more about immigration. As a PhD student let me give you a simple answer, that is really already contained in your own text:

Because it *is* trivial Econ 101 supply and demand. Sure, you can always try to quantify the effect, as your pal Borjas does.

But if you want to be a successful economist, you can't write about a topic where the theory is already developed and known. Which top journal is going to publish something about a topic that is basic supply and demand?

You are right in your characterization that economists do not do biodiversity because they don't understand genetics, no question about that. Most students here are shocked to learn that there is such a thing as say genetic differences between whites and Asians. Some are not hostile to accepting the idea, but if you have no intuition whatsoever about a topic, how are you going to do work with it? And of course I suspect journals are going to be very reluctant to accept work in this field, so obviously it will hurt your job market prospects in reputable schools.

But immigration is another story altogether. People don't do it simply because it is not a "hot" field theoretically, the causes and mechanism seems to already be well known. I kind of agree, any decent economist can tell you the mechanism behind immigration. I cannot see the room for great theoretical advances.

What knowledge that is needed to be disseminated in the public sphere and what gets rewarded in professional economics are two completely different things, the latter must not only be important, but also innovative. However the political correctness that makes research into biodiversity impossible is *not* the cause of the lack of research into immigration.

Since I am an immigrant (from [a Third World country] to [a European country], I already have some interest in the topic, and have considered writing about it. What is stopping me is not political correctness (which is what is stopping me from doing say race or IQ), but the lack on sophistication and consequently job market reward.

OK, so 90% of non-European immigrants in Sweden voted for the left in the last election (compared to 52% of the public). Easy to explain with simple theory.

OK, so less than half the immigrants from outside Europe and America have jobs in the welfare state. Trivial economics.

Nor do I want to be a Borjas type, just estimating the numbers for basic and already known theory, and in the process typecasting myself as another minority that only does work about minorities.

The only topic where I can see some room for advanced work is the political economy of immigration, why Europe and the US keep having immigration, even though it damages their respective societies, and is not supported by the majority of voters nor any strong special interest. I suspect that the cause is information asymmetries in politicians' intentions:

Voters don't want immigration, but they also have a strong aversion towards bigoted politicians (they want "nice" guys). Anyone can cheaply claim they are not racists and love all people, so just saying it is not enough. Supporting continued immigration is costly, but the cost is obviously higher for the bigoted bad guy than the nice liberal. So by not opposing immigration politicians credibly signal they are "compassionate," and in the end the only anti-immigration politicians that are left are the bigots. If voters are somewhat averse to immigration but very averse to racism they will vote for the good guys who support, even though they and the nice guys would both prefer to stop immigration.

The end result is a bad equilibrium where harmful policies are continued. One implication is also that referendums on immigration will be more anti-immigration than elections.

I might well write the paper above, but if I want to spend my time wisely immigration is not what I would concentrate on, when there is so much interesting work to be done in entrepreneurship, labour supply, political economics etc.

I hope this gives you some idea about the intellectual atmosphere that leads to so little work about immigration, even though the topic is important for the public. (I guess eventually some good rhetorician will quit academic economics and just write a simple version of what everyone knows for the public.)


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Whole Foods Demographics

The one thing I've noticed about the shoppers at the organic foods supermarket chain is the huge preponderance of Former Hot Babes. But where are the Current Hot Babes shopping? Do they get invited out to dinners constantly and thus don't need to shop at supermarkets much at all? Do they live on celery, black coffee, and cigarettes? Or can't they afford to shop at Whole Foods because they haven't snagged an affluent husband yet?

A reader responds:

"Trader Joe's seems to have a decent number of Current Hot Babes."

I only shop at Trader Joe's on the rare occasions when I need to pick up some kind of gift food to bring to a party, like an exotic dessert. I guess Current Hot Babes get invited to a lot more parties than I do.

Another reader writes:

Whole Foods definitely markets to people over 35, typically in their 40s & 50s. It's for those who are established and want to show off their status, while trying to mask their snootiness with feel-good flimflam about returning to nature. They're like the people my Italian professor called "gli ex-sessantottini" -- the ex-'68ers.

Trader Joe's markets to younger people, mostly 20-somethings who are part of the iPod group. Their customers don't want to appear snooty, but they still wouldn't condescend to shop with the rubes, so they go to the "alternative" alternative grocery store. Whereas WF names their products to showcase their organicness, naturalness, and purity, TJ names their products to showcase how hip & clever they are (e.g., a fig bar called "this fig walks into a bar..."). Essentially, WF customers broadcast their moral superiority, while the young 'uns at TJ broadcast their hipness quotient superiority. Where the hip lead, Hot Babes are sure to follow.

Or vice-versa. If Hot Babes decided to hang out in working coal mines, coal mines would be hip.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer